The Closest I Got To Celebrating Halloween

I probably ought to talk about comics. I picked up six weeks' worth of them yesterday. But I'm kind of fried and I'd like another day to look them over. So, Nightmare on Elm Street.

The coworkers wanted to watch it last night as a Halloween thing, and I've never seen it. I don't know why, besides not being a huge horror fan. But that hasn't stopped me from seeing several of the Friday the 13th films. Just one of those things.

So it was pretty good. Initially, I found Tina's death - where she's screaming on the ceiling while her idiot boyfriend repeatedly calls her name with an arm outstretched (as though her arm will magically grow ten feet longer and grab hold) - laughable. It looked so ridiculous, but at the same time, that felt like the point. How the heck is he supposed to tell anyone that and expect them to believe he didn't kill her? Freddy purposefully killed her in a way that leaves the boyfriend with no chance of proving his innocence, because his story is too wild to believe. So kudos to Krueger, I suppose.

I was more impressed with Johnny Depp's death, since we didn't see anything. He got dragged down into his bed, then a massive amount of blood shot up out of it and covered his ceiling to at least ankle depth. Then we see or hear about cops retching at the sight of his corpse. That's one of those times where there's just enough to let your imagination go wild, which is always preferrable.

I like the whole idea of parents dismissing their childrens' concern, even when it's genuine, and keeping secrets from them 'for their own good'. It plays into the whole nightmare aspect, that a kid is in a world where they don't understand the rules, where they don't know what's going on, and things can change from one moment to the next for no obvious reason. Didn't you experience that as a kid, rules that seemed arbitrary that you were expected to follow? That awareness there were all kinds of things adults were keeping from you? Dreams can be a lot like that, where you may recognize there's something strange about it, but no one else does. Of course, sometimes, you don't see anything odd about the dream either. I have dreams where I can teleport so often it doesn't even remotely surprise me any longer, even if there doesn't seem to be any reason why I can do that in this particular dream. I suppose that could be the equivalent of all these kids going through life, completely unaware of what their parents did years ago.

Before watching the film, I had actualy thought perhaps Krueger was a person innocently killed, and so he was taking revenge for his wrongful death. I hadn't realized he actually was a child killer even before the angry mob got ahold of him. I think I was banking on that Simpsons Halloween story with Groundskeeper Willie hewing closely to the source material. Willie didn't do anything wrong, other than work in a poorly built school in a district full of cheapskate parents, but he burned to death all the same.